


we'd been here before

by anniebibananie (alindy)



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, F/F, F/M, It's sad yo, Lost Love, i don't really know what else to say
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-13 22:02:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16480562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alindy/pseuds/anniebibananie
Summary: “I thought Narnia was just a dream,” Lucy reminded.Susan looked unbelievably old as she took a sip from her cup. “The best dreams are rooted in reality, aren’t they?”Two once queens as they struggle to grasp onto reality, each other, and the love and world they stand to lose.





	we'd been here before

**Author's Note:**

> I guess I'm just emotional about Narnia lately? I don't really have any explanation for it. WARNING I haven't read the books in like a decade so things are probably wrong, this is mostly just based on my own feelings and thoughts. It was therapeutic for me, so I hope you enjoy. 
> 
> References to Neil Gaiman's "The Problem of Susan", and there are some direct lines from C.S. Lewis's _Voyage of the Dawn Treader._
> 
> if you want some background music, check out my susan pevensie playlistst called [once a queen](https://open.spotify.com/user/1267341417/playlist/68WCkta4McTc2wtFZH599i?si=zNBHvsreQ0OUpcb-uxGv1A).

There were certain things Susan remembered she denied remembering. It was a coping strategy, more than anything else. When you fell into memories too easily you were susceptible to hope, to longing. It was too enticing to slip into the fur coat of Narnia, to feel the smoothness against her bare skin and remember what it felt to be deliciously alive. If you didn’t remember it out loud, you were safer in a way.

There were times, when Susan would watch the way Edmund and Peter spoke where she could smell the past hanging from their shoulders as if she was still sitting in her throne. The glittering in their eyes that reflected back shining armor and wars to be won. The clench of their fists that could have easily held a quill to sign a decree.

It was harder to see it on Lucy. Maybe that was the plight of women—to constantly have the power stamped out of you, to know the burden of your world more heavily than a man could ever understand. Or maybe she was just as strong and fierce and powerful, but Susan couldn’t stand to watch it because the world of England was not going to be kind to a girl who didn’t know her place.

“Come on, Susan,” Edmund said. “Don’t you want to go for a walk through the woods with us?”

She eyed the forest—thought about the fresh air, the open space, the wilderness that had once been more comfortable to her than brick castle walls.

“I’m just getting to the good bit in this book,” she said. “Next time.”

It was hard to watch the look in his eyes—pity? regret? disgust, almost?—so she usually tried to look away. Someday, they would stop asking. They would let her be this doll and talk about her as if she wasn’t there. _Remember when Susan used to have fun with us? Remember her before she became so prissy?_

Susan had always been good at sacrifices. Her childhood was merely the first.

* * *

Lucy woke from dreams more often than not. She would call them nightmares due to the dark figures and danger, but they brought her back to Narnia so they were dangerously alluring in their horror. Even in darkness, she would choose Narnia every time.

Sometimes they were battles, and Lucy could taste the blood in her mouth and coating her teeth. Sometimes feasts and dances, and she would remember the way her body was thrown around with the guidance of a man’s strength as she twirled, twirled, twirled until she wanted to fall.

“I can’t stand the dancing,” Lucy would tell Susan as they stood off to the side.

Lucy could never help comparing her sister to a well-decorated cake in her festive gowns the way she was iced in glitters and gold. They were usually trinkets from whoever had come to visit, and Susan would tell her it was all a peace treaty. _Someday you might have to learn these tools, too, sister,_ she would say with undeniable fondness. It had been easier, for the two of them, when the years separating them seemed so much smaller with age.

“It’s a bit fun, isn’t it? To be spun so hard you forget where the ceiling is and where the floor falls,” Susan said wistfully before turning to Lucy, a strength behind her steely eyes. “But you mustn’t forget you’re a queen, Lu. No one gets to make you spin unless you want to.”

There were days Edmund and Peter complained about how Susan fell into frivolous things like dresses and lipsticks. It was chatter that Lucy was not unfamiliar with, the same way they used to mock her for the suitors she entertained while on the throne, throwing around the word _gentle_ as if it was an insult, but Lucy knew that Susan had bones forged of steel underneath her sweet smiles. There were many ways to be strong, she would think.

During the days after their first time in Narnia, Lucy would pad down the halls and stairways of the Professor’s house to find the kitchen and make herself tea. More often than not, Susan was already stirring in a spoonful of sugar into her own china cup with the kettle still bubbling on the stove.

“Would you like me to fix you a cup?” she asked, as if she had already known she was going to be there. In some ways, maybe she had. Their own sisterly ritual.

“I can fix it myself,” Lucy said, her voice so much higher than the calming lilt she had grown to love as she aged. “You always add too much sugar.”

Susan tapped her spoon against the rim lightly, almost as if searching for the music of it more than to dislodge the excess liquid. “It was the way Aravis used to make cups when she’d stay with us,” Susan said with a bitterly sweet smile. “She won me over on it, eventually.”

Though Lucy had dreams that were dark, sometimes she dreamt of mundane things like the way the corridors always felt the perfect temperature as she walked through or the wild berries you could hunt down on the outskirts of the forest. She would remember the princesses Peter would flirt with over dinners, and the shy smiles Ed would shoot to the ladies of the court. Susan turned down every man, but the smiles she would send to Aravis were wide and free.

There had been a time once, when Lucy was winding her way through the halls to avoid the over exuberance of the party (she couldn’t remember why she had left, what it had been that turned her mood sour when she so often could make the best of a bad), where she had stumbled onto a small alcove. Susan giggled wildly, and she had wrapped herself around Aravis like a coiled vine.

Lucy knew she should leave and forget whatever she saw, but there was something in the way Susan looked softer here that was so alluring. Susan dipped forward, tucked a strand of Aravis’s hair behind her ear, and kissed her soundly on the lips. It was soft, casual, not the first time. For some reason, it had brought tears to Lucy’s eyes as she turned to leave.

Maybe love for Susan was always going to be doomed—Narnia or England. How in love Susan must have been to let Aravis make her heart spin like that.

“I thought Narnia was just a dream,” Lucy reminded.

Susan looked unbelievably old as she took a sip from her cup. “The best dreams are rooted in reality, aren’t they?”

* * *

Going back to Narnia was not everything Susan could hope for. It was as if they had walked into a memory or a dream. The imprint was similar, but it didn’t taste quite right. She felt like an intruder on what had once been her home.

Peter and Edmund and Lucy were so happy, though, and she felt ungrateful. All those they had lost, though, all that _they_ had lost. It was harder to fall into your greatest desire when you knew it would be pulled from you, leaving you like an addict in withdrawal.

 _Better not to love it too much,_ Susan told herself. _Maybe if you want it less, they’ll let you stay this time._

* * *

She felt her youth more acutely now, standing beside Caspian as he smiled at her like family, like a child. If Lucy were older, maybe, if she was still a queen…

But she couldn’t even remember what having curves had felt like. To be sure in her body, in her smile, in her femininity. She had been a woman, and now she was a child again.

“Here,” Caspian offered, holding out his hands to help her over the fallen log.

If she was older, maybe he would grab onto her waist and hoist her over. She shouldn’t want these things, though, because loving anything meant saying goodbye to it. Mr. Tumnus, Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, even Aslan himself. Everything they loved and touched and held dear slipped between their fingers in the end.

“Thank you,” she said, holding onto his forearm for a beat too long. He smiled wide, unaware, but Lucy turned to see Edmund’s eyes trailing over the gesture like he was searching for a piece to fit into the puzzle.

“Lu…” he began, and he looked practically king-like. Almost as if he was about to proclaim something.

She shook her head, and his voice fell silent. Edmund the Just. He had always been good at knowing when to be silent and listen, when to say nothing at all. That was why he had always been better at politics than Peter. Peter was too concerned with being his title—magnificent, star-studded, every bit the king he wanted to be.

“Be careful,” he said instead, reaching down to squeeze her hand before moving forward.

* * *

“Do you remember what it felt like to be wanted?” Susan had asked on Christmas morning, and Lucy thought about it now as she stared up at the Narnian stars. Ed and Peter had still been asleep, the sun barely peeking over the skyline.

Lucy had thought about how strange the conversation would look to someone from the outside—two young girls, barely blossoming talking about longing and desire they should never understand.

Wistfully, Lucy thought about eyes on her that had made her feel beautiful. Curves and height and supple skin. Lucy had been beautiful once, not that she had cared much. Now that she wasn’t, though, it seemed to hurt more.

She watched the way Susan eyed the sun rising, and wondered if it was Aravis she thought of. It must be, right?

“Yes,” Lucy said, and it sounded so much like _I wish I didn’t._

“Me too.” _I long for it_ , maybe. _I miss her._

“Susan,” Lucy whispered into the darkness as she pulled herself back to the present, looking at her sister’s curved back in the light of the dying fire. “Su.”

“Go to bed, Lucy,” she whispered back. “We have a long day tomorrow.”

Lucy didn’t know how to tell Susan she loved her, so she reached out a hand instead and curled their fingers together. Susan clasped back before letting go, curving further into herself.

* * *

Susan welcomed the door this time. _Too old_ , Aslan had decreed, but how did she still look so young? How did she feel so old and so young at the same time?

They wanted her to hesitate. She walked through the door without looking back.

* * *

“It was never going to be work,” Susan said as she slipped under the covers of Lucy’s bed. “He could feel it on me, that I loved him less now.”

Lucy didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything. She wrapped her arms around Susan and held her to her chest as if she was older, better at caring for her sister, not a girl who had barely hit puberty.

When Susan fell apart in her arms, Lucy wished she knew how to stitch her back together. She didn’t have a healing draught here, but it wouldn't heal the heart anyways. Maybe some breaks were too deep.

* * *

“You know, Peter and I feel it too,” Edmund said. Their book bags were spilling with papers and notebooks around them. Lucy liked doing homework with Ed, because he understood the silence of study better than their other siblings.

Lucy never used to be quiet, but now there was a comfort in her silence.

“We were great kings, and now we are barely men,” he said. “We were ripped from our home.”

How could you possibly make yourself forget a place that had raised you? Lucy may have been born a girl of this world, but her fire and soul and every atom of her being belonged to Narnia and the family she had made there. The people who had helped raised her had known her longer than her parents here ever could.

Lucy wished she could explain to Edmund, though, that Susan and Lucy had a bond because they would never be queens again. Peter and Edmund still had hope for power and praise. They were respected with every phrase they said, and Susan and Lucy had to speak with all the air in their lungs for a hope of being heard. That or they had to use other tactics, smile with saccharin tilts of their lips tasting of arsenic.

“Would you have given it up?” she asked. “If you could have chosen to never go, to not remember any of it... would you have chosen to be merely a man of Earth?”

Edmund shook his head, and Lucy thought she could see the signs of an older version of him. He was already growing into the king he was in Narnia, and Lucy was jealous as she still felt the weight of childhood on all of her limbs.

“You wouldn’t give up air, you need it to breath,” he said. “Narnia was the greatest thing to ever happen to us. Better to have loved and lost.” He looked down at his notebook and tapped the pencil against the blank sheet. When he looked back up, his face was open. “I wish she could talk to us about it. I knew she loved her. We all lost love.”

Lucy sucked in a breath. There was something so wrong about understanding her sister now better than she had ever before, finding each other in their tragedy.

“Give her time,” Lucy said. “She just needs time, and _we_ need to do our school work.”

“That was one nice thing about being royalty,” he said. “I don’t remember doing so many maths.”

“Oh, we did,” Lucy said with a laugh. “We just remember the tales of adventure.”

He looked at her, like he was looking through her and seeing someone else. They all did that now, didn’t they? Yearn to reconcile the people they had become and the people they were forced to be now. Where was the truth in them? Who were they really?

When he nodded and went back to his work, Lucy felt melancholy. She was happy, at least, to have her siblings in whatever world she was in. After all they’ve been through, at least they had three others who understood their plight.

* * *

The Christmas tree was a thing of beauty, and Susan took pride in her work. These were the things she took pride in now—appearances, grades, other trivial things. All the things she could control. Control was the most alluring mistress, and she was entranced underneath its pull.

“Happy Christmas, Su,” Lucy said, handing over a present with mismatched ribbon.

Susan pulled the brown wrapping back carefully as if she might save it, despite knowing there was no need. It was a small box, and she opened it up to find a floral pendant hanging from a golden string. It almost looked like the small pink florals that sprouted in Calormen, near the river bank. Aravis had worn a bracelet fashioned with them all around her wrist.

Looking up, Susan tried to find the secret in Lucy’s face. Did she know what she did? She had to.

“Thank you,” Susan said, holding the necklace in her hand. “A bit flashy, perhaps, but I’m sure I can fashion it somehow.”

Lucy rolled her eyes. “I’m sure you can.”

Then Edmund was running in and chasing Lucy around the room, and Susan was yelling at them to act their age as Peter laughed hearty laughs, and the world kept moving on.

* * *

The water was colder than she remembered, though Lucy had never been this far out from Cair Paravel perhaps. The wood of the boat underneath her feet felt more solid than the ground of England ever had.

Edmund seemed to brighten being back on the boat, his shirt hanging slightly open and blowing in the breeze. Responsibility hung wonderfully from his shoulders. Lucy could feel her own energy surge awake, the heart of her bursting back to life.

“The valiant,” Caspian said, and it was like being called home after a long day.

She smiled wide and soaked in the sun. “That’s who I was once.”

He smiled beautifully back. “That’s who you are, now. Narnia welcomes you home.”

Her whole body smiled.

* * *

Something about Narnia always managed to make her and Ed fall on more equal footing, like they both rose to their full heights and could see the world more clearly from there. Lucy had forgotten how much she missed it back in England. Now they stayed up late nights, walking the decks and trying to soak in every minute they could grasp onto with open palms.

(Eustace slept too much, but he could not know what he stood to lose, yet. He will learn, as they have all had to learn).

“Do you ever feel like you will never fully be yourself?” Edmund asked as they stood at the back of the ship, watching waves crash into the wet wood. “That we are doomed to only be half-selves back in England?”

“Without a doubt,” Lucy said. She tasted the salt on her tongue. The sea seemed to suit her even more than a kingdom had, and she wished she had spent more time on boats the first time around. “This is a cruel path we have been given.”

“A beautiful one, too,” Edmund said. “If only it didn’t hurt so much.”

Lucy didn’t say anything, but she knew he understood she agreed. She thought about Susan and Peter back at home, knowing they were gone and thinking about the adventures they could be having. The adventures they had once, too.

They were all fairytales, and Lucy was not sure if they had happy endings yet or not.

* * *

“Both suitors wanted her hand so badly,” Lucy said one evening as her and Caspian sat on the deck, feet dangling over the edge, “they attempted to outbid the other with greater and grander gifts. An ox. A hundred pounds of gold. A dress weaved from Charnian spider’s thread. All the while, Susan wanted nothing to do with it. Peter kept having to tell them no while Susan was off dealing with a trade partnership.”

Lucy laughed lightly, thinking about the way Susan’s disinterest had grown from polite to aggravated, accentuated with rolling eyes and groans.

“She did not love them?” Caspian asked, a brow raised.

“No, she did not,” Lucy said as she watched the water move. She could feel the heat of Caspian at her side. She felt so small. “She loved someone else.”

“Maybe that makes sense,” Caspian said, rifling a hand through his hair. Lucy watched him from the corner of his eyes—he still looked unfamiliar with the way regality played at his features. “There was such longing with the way she watched Narnia, sadness though too.”

Maybe that was the way they all eyed Narnia, though, she thought.

“It can be hard to think of you all as the Kings and Queens that I used to be told stories of. You look so…”

 _Young_ , she finished in her head. He looked at her, searching, questioning. It was like being picked apart until she felt bare.

“When I first met you all,” Caspian said, shifting his subject as he turned his eyes back to the sea, “I kept feeling as if I saw two people. I could see you the way you were in front of me and yet there were also these glimpses into other people, the drawings of you I had grown up seeing. The way Peter could command a room simply by entering it. The way Edmund’s eyes soaked up everything around him, saving the information for later. It was like the rulers you were were simply underneath your skin, peeking out.”

Lucy felt a wetness on her cheek, and she wiped it away quickly. To be seen. What a truly and fully awakening baptism. “What about me?” she asked, her voice fragile.

He turned, eyes trailing over the planes of her face and the dampness that was still evident. “You had a goodness that didn’t feel real. You are still the bravest person I have met.”

There was a cliff that Lucy had been walking the edge of since she had first felt her knobby knees against the wood of this ship, clothes sopping wet, and after his words she could feel herself fall over. No, she could feel herself leap. She was giving herself to Narnia for this last hurrah, because she needed to taste and breath in every last morsel of it while she still had the chance.

“I didn’t mind waking up young again when I went back, not at first,” Lucy said. “I trusted Aslan, but sometimes, now, I do wish the outsides matched the years I’ve lived inside.” She stood up to her feet, feeling her shoulders push back. “Goodnight, Caspian.”

She didn’t want to hear what he would say to that, didn’t want to see what his eyes would say. The pity, maybe. The sadness, perhaps.

* * *

Maybe all fairytales were tragedies, and they were merely told with happy endings to appease children. Another coping mechanism for the amount of loss they had to suffer in this world.

Lucy was becoming bolder as she felt the clock tick in her chest, the time slipping by quicker and quicker. She plunged into the water without regard. On land, her and Edmund ran like they were children enjoying the last bits of sunlight before having to return home for dinner. That sort of childhood had never been allotted to them before—in England or here in Narnia—and they were happy to pretend their shoulders didn’t carry weight.

But all things ended. Lucy understood now the way Susan and Peter must have felt as they watched their land for the last time. It was hard to give away Narnia to other hands, to know you wouldn’t get to love it yourself anymore. Who was she if not a queen? Who was she if not Narnian?

“Must you really go?” Caspian asked Edmund at the bough of the ship. Lucy heard it over the wind, walking the ship by herself.

“We have to leave when it’s our time,” Edmund said. Lucy wondered if it was easier for him, knowing the rules of Narnia in his just heart or if it was as difficult.

The whole ship seemed to creak as Lucy took a step forward, and the two boys playing at men turned to see her. Caspian’s features seemed elongated in the moonlight, and Edmund looked younger beside him somehow. The image hurt for some reason, and Lucy turned instead of entering the conversation.

She went back to her cabin, _Caspian’s_ cabin, and sat on the bed. If she leaned in, the sheets still smelled of him somehow—salt and sandalwood and _Narnia._ The same smells that blew across the breeze when they would sit thigh to thigh on the ship deck.

That night she dreamt of herself but older—not fully a queen, yet, but the age of the girls who watched their beaus go off to war. The age where bitterness had taken Susan so fully, maybe, and Lucy felt full in her body. There was power in her legs and color on her skin, freckles spilling over her shoulders.

It was a dance, and in her head Lucy could hear Susan’s voice on repeat. _You mustn’t forget you’re a queen, Lu. No one gets to make you spin unless you want to._ There was Caspian, grasping her hand and spinning her around the floor until she couldn’t see the ceiling or feel the floor.

When she woke with a start, her body was slick with sweat. Her feet padded against the wooden floor as she sought out the unbidden air. Despite the fact that it had been hours, Caspian had barely moved from his spot on the deck. Lucy moved toward him, sat down beside him.

“Bad dreams, queen?” he asked.

“Bad dreams, king?” she countered.

He shrugged good heartedly, laughing softly underneath his breath. “I am not ready to be a king.”

“That’s what will make you a great one.”

He didn’t reply, but Lucy could feel him twirling the words over in his head. “Lucy, I… before you go, I must ask something. I fear it is a bit inappropriate, though.”

Her heart skipped a beat. “Ask.”

“I almost feel as if, at times, you watch me and you think about something you do not wish to tell me. Is there some secret, some bit of knowledge you have been holding back about my rule? I would hate to disappoint you. All of you.”

Lucy turned to see the pure earnest in his facial features. His eyes were full. And what did she have to lose, really? In a land she was too old to belong to (though she had lived here, once, to much older and where was the logic in that)? The air of possibility flew through her, and she shrugged with honesty. The strength in her shoulders felt as if she was wearing her crown.

“I sometimes think in another life, in another world, in another version of this story I could have loved you,” she said.

It was not the answer he was expecting, and Lucy couldn't read his face even if she had wanted to try. It yearned for something, though, and Lucy could understand that. She didn’t regret anything about her life here, and yet she couldn’t help that selfish desire to hope for a little more. There was an undeniable trust she placed in Aslan, but she could not tamp the feelings in her heart that pulled at something.

“Lucy the valiant,” Caspian said, and in another life Lucy was sure it would have sounded like _I love you._ Maybe if they were older. Maybe if there was more time. Maybe if things were different.

“I will miss you, my friend,” she said, and she leaned into his shoulder when he reached out an arm to squeeze her with affection.

“Narnia will not be the same.”

* * *

“It would always feel sooner,” Caspian said before they parted, referencing what he had said after speaking to Aslan and discovering they would have to leave him.

( _"Caspian, dear," said Lucy. "You knew we'd have to go back to our own world sooner or later."_

 _"Yes," said Caspian with a sob, "but this is sooner."_ )

“Us leaving?” she asked.

He nodded.

Then she reached out for his hand and gave it a squeeze—the ability to provide relief, joy, strength in their parting was valiant in its own. “Then until we meet again in Aslan’s world.”

He dipped to kiss the crown of her skull. “Until we meet again.”

* * *

_Dear Lucy,_

_To love is to lose. I am so sorry you had to find it out for yourself._

_I sent along a new skirt for your coming school year. Always best to present with a good first image. The weather here is picking up quite nicely. I’ve been working on a garden. It would be lovely if you could come visit some time._

_Warm Regards,_

_Susan_

Hardened, and angry, and feeling like a ship lost at sea without a port to come home to, Lucy burned the letter in the fireplace. Then she turned toward her wardrobe—a different one, nothing special about it really—and opened her heart as wide as she could for Narnia.

* * *

Lucy would think on later if she had known, stepping onto that train. Had she felt it? What ( _who_ ) she left behind? As she watched the landscape roll by, she could have sworn for a moment that she saw Susan reflected in the train window. Beautiful, as always.

Then, she was gone. Then, so was London.

* * *

She was gentle. At one time, they had said she was gentle. Susan didn’t think that was true, anymore.

She smoked cigarettes that burned her lungs. Her voice was beginning to grow into a growl—something more feral than female. At nights, she kissed boys and girls in alleyways in equal measure. She was always awake by the dawn, though, with a cup of tea or coffee in her system and in perfectly placed costume.

The other girls didn’t know what to do with her at school. They called her snobby, because she carried herself with too much grace. Or they called her slut, because they sometimes saw the darkened flesh she was so careful to cover up around her neck.

There were terrible things she would take back, and there were things that were not that terrible she would take back, too. She would love them better. She would have spoken kinder in her letters. Maybe, she could have offered some sort of solace.

But the past, much like Narnia, was an unattainable beast. Her heart was filled with fire and rage, no longer the gentle, she was afraid. No longer carrying any of her grace from a time and a land long lost.

* * *

**_Some Time Later_ **

“Professor,” the girl called, following after her through the campus. A student on a bicycle rushed past, and the girl jolted to the side of the walkway. “Oi!”

The professor kept walking with her sturdy steps, punctuated with the clack of her heels. Her briefcase swung by her side. The girl jogged slightly, trying to catch up to her side.

“Professor,” she began again as she fell in step beside her. The professor looked up, and it was as if she was surfacing from the depths of the lake, breaking the sun-stained surface. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

“Oh no, no bother,” the professor replied. There were wrinkles over her pale skin, hair twisted up off of her neck, and a light shade of pink across her lips. Her steps slowed to match the girl. “What is it I can help you with?”

“I just wondered…” The girl faltered. Earlier, as she had sat with crossed legs and a pencil in her hands it had seemed easier to ask, but now she felt silly for chasing her down. “Well, you mentioned the Lewis books and Narnia, but the story you referenced isn’t actually in the books. Is there a short story or–”

The professor woke from thought again, cutting in. “You won’t find it in the texts. No no. I do get a bit carried away sometimes, usually I refrain from using them in the course, but the department wanted me to add it in.”

“You just, you said something,” the girl began cautiously, “about the way it would feel to be queen. I don’t know if I’ve ever had anyone analyze the queens as such powerful beings—without greed or over-sexualization. It was nice. Somewhere I’d want to go, certainly.”

It was almost as if the girl could see those thoughts played out on the planes of the professor’s face again. What was she thinking about? She wished she could dive into her brain and imagination.

“You know, I think so too, my dear.” Her lips quirked up in the corner. For a moment, the sun glistened off of her hair, almost like a glittering jewel. “Perhaps someday I can again.”

* * *

A valiant girl waits in a paradise far away, with her heart still wide open, for her sister. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr at [anniebibananie](http://anniebibananie.tumblr.com/)


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